Thoughts on Inaugeration + Deastro is Paste's Featured Artist

MUSIC NEWS:
Detroit's Deastro is the featured artist of the day on Paste.com - in fact, if you check out the web site today, it's the "lead story"
http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/01/artist-of-the-week-deastro.html

cheers...

(also, finally featured on Pitchfork, here:
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/download/148416-new-music-deastro-parallelogram-mp3)

"Parallelogram"






















~~~~~

so then, moving on to the inauguration:



















As I've said a few times already throughout the winter:
"It's going to feel weird to actually like the President..."

And, once I said it I sort of scared myself - I think the country may be getting a bit too inebriated on Hope. I just got off the phone with Eric Earley, the lead singer/guitarist from Blitzen Trapper - and since he was one of the first human beings I encountered today, on this Martin Luther King Day, Jan 19 - 2009, I shared my own feelings, my apprehensions, about the ravenous celebrations for Barack Obama's inauguration with him. To which, he claimed himself to be an eternal cynic - which is disconcerting, yes...but in times like these...perhaps we need such people around, to bring us back down...

It IS historical and it IS to be ravenously celebrated. That cannot be expressed enough...

I'm just hoping that when the streamers flutter to the ground and the applause fades away and our rock star Commander-in-Chief slides cooly into the oval office - that we all wise up and start remembering that cynicism can be a very healthy thing. And so can desent. Even in the face of what has the potential to be one of the most popular presidencies of all time. We all liked Clinton most of the time - but he got away with some grimy, seruptitious back-alley buggery of the American trust.

But, I say all this while being a...well, avid(?) Obama supporter. Let us not all get drugged into a submissive lull...while the government continues dealing shady stabs into the already devastatingly bedraggled sails of the next generations ship.

And, at the same time - YES...let us celebrate this indescribably monumental moment in history.

The present - is immensely exciting for the potential we hold in our hands. The future - is uncertain...let's not fuck it up this time.

readings:
Bush:

http://www.alternet.org/democracy/120750/the_bushies_stole_us_blind_..._so%2C_how%27d_you_like_your_beer/
"The eight years of national suicide known as the Bush administration is at last coming to an end..."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/19/bush-protest-shoes-thrown_n_159223.html
Shoes Thrown at White House on Bush's Final Day...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/19/no-pardon-for-scooter-lib_n_159201.html
"No Pardon for Scooter Libby"

Obama:

from Joan Walsh (salon.com)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/01/19/mlk/
"With Martin Luther King Jr.'s 80th birthday celebration only a day before Barack Obama becomes our first black president, it's impossible not to focus on the redemptive symmetry between 1968, when King was murdered, and 2008, the year of Obama's unlikely victory. But I find myself thinking much more about 1966 as I wonder whether and how Obama can complete King's work..."

NPR: Obama set for victory throng...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99561987http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99561987

Mother Jones: The Next Prez's Super Powers?
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/09/exit-strategy-power-corrupts.html

Paul Krugman's "Ideas for Obama"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/opinion/12krugman.html